“I met my husband when I was 22. Our family histories are very different. My parents made themselves, they started quite low on the civil service ladder, invested themselves enormously and both ended up as executives. We are a Mediterranean family, where we argue, we say what we have to say and we forgive each other. Obviously it’s not ideal, there are ups and downs, but that’s how I grew up.
At my husband’s, we don’t talk. His mother comes from the penniless Lyon bourgeoisie; his father made himself all alone, too, exercising a liberal profession. My stepfather had a great influence in his family, a hold on his ex-wife and on his eldest daughter, my sister-in-law. Everything he gave had a cost, a psychic enslavement, a moral debt. My husband’s sister had a difficult teenage crisis from which she emerged without a diploma, without qualifications and almost without education. Young, she had made a big bourgeois marriage which had not lasted more than a year and had divorced. She ended up working for my stepfather – he hired her, thereby maintaining his addiction.
“When we came home with my husband, after our visits to his father, I had a stomach ache, it took me two or three days to recover”
I set foot in there without realizing what awaited me. From the beginning, I was uncomfortable in the presence of my stepfather. Once we went to see him for lunch and we were greeted by the Requiem of Mozart at full blast in the living room, we had to wait until the end of the Dies irae [« jour de colère »] to talk to each other. The atmosphere of the meal was set. When we came home with my husband after our visits, I had a stomach ache, it took me two or three days to get over it.
The birth of my eldest daughter, nineteen years ago, was a detonator. I had the impression that my stepfather wanted to take her from me, to monopolize her. He came to the maternity ward, took her against him, put her close to his face. He wanted to have her as a baby carrier against his belly, but she had just been born! At the hospital, he told my parents that he would have preferred his daughter to have a child. At the time, she was on an IVF journey with her new husband, I know it was very complicated and painful, but anyway… It looked like he was trying to make up for the mistakes made in his life as a father. But that baby wasn’t his daughter, it was my daughter! His role on earth was not to fill a void in his grandfather. I wanted to protect her.
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